A New Game Engine Being Developed In Our Country

[baqai]

We are 3rd world country ( Pakistan ) and its kinda healthy changed that a gaming engine is being developed in our country :)

The engine is called Helios 2.0

Main Website

www.itrango.com

Specifications

http://www.itrango.com/Helios2Alpha-SpecSheet.pdf

Physics Demo

http://www.itrango.com/Demo/PHYSICS_HELIOS2.wmv

Shaders Demo

http://www.itrango.com/Demo/SHADERS_HELIOS2.wmv



Here is a discussion going on guru3d forums on the subject

hxxp://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?threadid=157562

I didn't expect the response to be so positive , really happy to see that u guys liked it. They're working on a 3rd person shooter games based off this engine and will be released sometime next year, demo will most probably come out november/december though it's not confirmed.. Some info about it from the developers:

I can't quote the exact date for the public release of the game demo, but it will be sometime around september or october, this year. Too late eh! don't blame me. The trailer might be released sooner (i am not guaranteeing anything, its not in my control)

A few details about the engine and the demos that are on the site:

The engine will be targetting international market and will have features comparable to any top class game engine in 2006 (thats when its due for release). Forget Doom3, thats old tech now. A few notes about the crappy resolution and other things:

1. The resolution is crappy because we live in a poor country and could not afford to get a bamboo machine to do the recordings. So we had to do all that on a borrowed Ahtlon 64 3000+ w/ 6600 GT (128MB). The frame rate was excellent even at high resolutions (in excess of 100 FPS), but while recording with FRAPS the FPS dropped to around 30 or 40 FPS, and our physics demo (due to some limitation that we'll fix later on) needed 60 FPS, so the physics demo had to be recorded at 400x300 resolution and thats when we decided to release the whole demo at that resolution.

2. The technology of the engine is still under development and we are planning on releasing a better, more complete demo by this year end or start of next year which will be more detailed!

would love to hear your reviews :)


regards,

Saquib

[Midnight Dream]

Not bad. I was impressed with the physics preview, but the only thing is, I noticed lag in their demo, just from watching. Now, if this is attributed to poor computers, or the engine itself, I dont know.

[baqai]

As i quoted above

1. The resolution is crappy because we live in a poor country and could not afford to get a bamboo machine to do the recordings. So we had to do all that on a borrowed Ahtlon 64 3000+ w/ 6600 GT (128MB). The frame rate was excellent even at high resolutions (in excess of 100 FPS), but while recording with FRAPS the FPS dropped to around 30 or 40 FPS, and our physics demo (due to some limitation that we'll fix later on) needed 60 FPS, so the physics demo had to be recorded at 400x300 resolution and thats when we decided to release the whole demo at that resolution.


:)

[Midnight Dream]

lol, sorry, I totally missed that

[deathman20]

Downloading the videos right now to check this out. New engines always look promissing as long as its released within a timeframe or others take the idea and it becomes old news.

Good luck to them.

[mdameron]

Good luck on yall's project! Awesome to see a third world country stepping up to the plate! Maybe a technological revolution in your country is on the way?

[ju5tin99]

The engine looks nice. Now let's hope they can get a good game designer working on the project. A good engine can only take you so far, a good game idea is necessary to make it really successful. (See Doom3)

[baqai]

For those of you who havent checked out the spec sheet here are the engines specs

Helios – NEXGEN ENGINE

NOTE: Features in yellow have not been implemented in the Alpha release.

Version 2.0 Alpha - Features

General


Written in pure C++ and totally object oriented.
High performance real time 3D rendering using OpenGL.
Portable to Linux and MacOS. Runs on Windows95, 98, NT, 2000, XP.
Direct import of common mesh file formats: Halflife levels (.bsp), Quake 3 / Doom 3 models (.md3/.md5).
Extensible plug-in based architecture to integrate additional fileformats (e.g. AutoCAD/Microstation files) and functionality seamlessly.
Direct import of Textures: Windows Bitmap (.bmp), JPEG File Interchange Format (.jpg), Truevision Targa (.tga).
Optimized fast 3D math.
Directly reading from (compressed) archives. (.zip)
Comprehensive font rendering library with support for Truetype Fonts (TTF), Bitmap Fonts, Outline Fonts etc.
Supports high level scripting based on LUA.
SSE, SSE2, SSE3 and 3DNow! optimized libraries for taking advantage of modern CPUs.
Powerful, customizable and easy to use 2D GUI System with Buttons, Lists, Edit boxes.

Visual

Dynamic lighting support


Global Lighting (Point/Directional/Projective Lighting)
Depth/Projective Shadows - including a variety of techniques for realistic soft shadows, complete with projective textures.
Normal Mapping (Bump Mapping, Virtual Displacement Mapping / Parallax Mapping)
A variety of post processing effects such as High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI), Depth of Field etc.
Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS)
Unified lighting support using high quality soft shadow maps for high performance rendering on high end machines.
Mixed rendering using light maps and real-time lighting (and shadows), for mid-range systems.
High quality lightmap support for use in low-end systems.
Multi-texturing (up to 32 textures)
Image preserving simplification


Extensive material system support


Support for multiple shader languages (Currently, GLSL and nVidia’s Cg). Shaders from different languages can be mixed during rendering seamlessly.
Support for a variety of common material effects such as refraction / reflection etc.
Materials can be changed dynamically at run-time.
Integrated Particle System with a variety of programmable effects.



Large indoor/outdoors map support


Multiple renderers supporting different architectures like terrains (ROAM), indoor(BSP/ABT) and outdoor environments(ABT)
Terrain renderer based on ROAM algorithm supporting huge terrain rendering with real-time level of detail support
NexGen terrain renderer based on Clip Map algorithm with GPU acceleration support. Optimally renders around 60 million triangles on a GeForce 6800.
Hierarchical architecture supporting multiple BSP structures on terrains and vice versa
Seamless transition between indoor/outdoor environments.
An extremely efficient indoor map renderer based on BSP trees with support for PVS, portals and precomputed radiosity based lighting.
Completely new and optimized indoor/outdoor renderer based on ABT and occlusion queries allowing huge model rendering (tested on 12.5 million poly plant models).
The renderer is extensible with support for adding translators for virtually any file format for efficient rendering (e.g. AutoCAD, Microstation, 3dsmax, Maya etc.)

Miscellaneous


Highly optimized view culling system
Sky system with animated layers
State of the art skeletal based model format with importers and exporters for Maya and 3dsmax
Skeletal animation supports hardware and software skinning.
Physics engine supports gravity, damping, elasticity, friction, and hinge, ball, wheel, and slider joints.
Path tracking for camera, actors or vehicles
Realistic water simulation
Volumetric fog


Physics


High detail rigid body physics based on Open Dynamics Engine (ODE)
Rigid Body Physics system designed in a way where it can easily be replaced by any other commercial grade physics engine like Havoc.
Supports high performance joints and constraints solvers supporting Ball and socket, Hinge, Hinge 2, Universal, Slider, Amotor. The joints can be used to create entities like
Ragdolls
Vehicles
Cloth simulation
Buoyancy
Powerful and extensible collision detection system supporting bounding box and geometry level collision



Networking


Internet/LAN based multiplayer support using Raknet
Supports up to 32 players
Highly customizable optimized architecture


Audio


3D Audio Support
3D sound sources (WAV and OGG) with Doppler effect


Tools


Completely unified content workflow model based on Quark (Quake Army Knife)
Character and Element modeling using Alias Maya / Discreet 3dsmax
Customized exporters and plug-ins for pipeline integration
Complete content creation suite for 3dsmax and Maya

[veryhumid]

that is a really cool physics demo... amazing lighting! keep us posted if some games come out with this engine.

[baqai]

as a matter of a fact they are developing a game based on the engine i will post more details :)

how do you guys compare the engine with other engines like doom3, halflife2 etc??? if you ask me

1. the video is of crap resolution so it just doesnt justifies, once they get good res video out we will be able to appretiate it more

2. Character modelling is very weak IMHO

[postaldudeleo]

Are you part of the company? Anyhow, the engine looks nice indeed. I think this is a nice step forward.

[baqai]

no i am not part of the company .. wish i was :( just spreading the news ... :)

[Nexus Realized]

I've only watched the lighting demo so far, I think it looks great.

[Elif Tymes]

VERY NICE from an unknown company. I'd have to say it's got some sweet effects. Especially colored Shadows! Voo+!

[Chris_F]

That's what I like to see in new game engines. :)

[cre8]

looks good

[Janus67]

I'm getting some definite dead links here already.

[OC Noob]

Bandwidth exceeded:(

Oh well. We are seeing some nice engines from other countries and from relative unknowns when it come to engine developing. Crytek and the guys that did Riddick come to mind.

[mage_x]

it looks just like every other game that's coming out these days.

[baqai]

mage_x that ineed is a compliment keeping in mind that these guys had no prior experience of developing a gaming engine, these guys are fresh graduates and they started this as their final year project :)

the engine have many features which popular engines like doom3, utk3, halflife2 are offering along with certain new features

[AdvanS13]

i agree on the character modeling comment, but i'm guessing that was purposeful. the lighting looks great, rough or not :)

[ninthebin]

well I dont think we can fault them on texture work / modelling - they are making an engine so they probably only need something sufficient enough to be a decent quality to show off their engine effects but not have some poor joe working day and night perfecting something for a few tech vids.

The effects being used are good, very much the same effects your seeing in modern / up and coming engines from well established game developers, whats even more impressive is that you say this is a final year uni project

Although if Itrango are going to be using this to create a game with this then thats anybodys ball game, whilst the engine is nice, its a different kettle of fish coming up with a good concept for a game and being able to follow through on it - and afaik most publishers start putting out on content rather than lighting effects. But I hope they do get a good publisher behind them and maybe even offer a cheaper alternative than source / doom3 / unreal3.0 with licensing their engine out to other game developers